“. . . helping my people know themselves: ” Late William Dean Howells

The essay compares the late phase of William Dean Howells’s writing career with that of Henry James and relates both to the pragmatic theories of Henry James’s brother William. While Howells, during the 1890s, became a literary institution, Henry James—after his disastrous attempt to achieve “fame and fortune” via the theater—reinvented himself as a novelist absolutely dedicated to his craft. Although Henry seems close to the pragmatist ideas of his brother when he explores an inner world of consciousness in his late fiction, William preferred the stylistic and ethical clarity of Howells’s work to the convolutions of his brother’s novels. For his part, Howells, in his review of Principles of Psychology, ignored William James’s discussion of the “stream of thought” and instead emphasized his notion of building character by habit and self-discipline. All three aimed at “unstiffening” (and thus saving) an order of civilization threatened by the social and cultural changes of the late 19th century. In this project, Henry James and Howells can be said to occupy related yet opposite positions. Howells placed the realism of his late work on the borderline separating “civilized” life from the “savage world” beneath it. For him, writing was therefore a civilizing act of self-denial; and by grounding the social function of his fiction on self-transcending and communicative Reason as the basis of all “balance and proportion,” he tended to distrust the “imagination” (for Henry James a liberating force) since he saw it as allied to all forms of excessive (and socially destructive) selfishness.